This is a comprehensive account of the parliament of early modern England at work, written by the leading authority on sixteenth-century English, constitutional and political history. Professor Elton explains how parliament dealt with bills and acts, discusses the many various matters that came to notice there, and investigates its role in political matters. In the process he proves that the prevailing doctrine, developed by the work of Sir John Neale, is wrong, that parliament did not acquire a major role in politics; that the notion of a consistent, body of puritan agitators in opposition to the government is mere fiction and, although the Commons processed more bills than the House of Lords, the Lords occupied the more important and influential role. Parliament's fundamental function in the government of the realm lay rather in the granting of taxes and the making of laws. The latter were promoted by a great variety of interests - the Crown, the Privy Council, the bishops, and particularly by innumerable private initiators. A very large number of bills failed, most commonly for lack of time but also because agreement between the three partners (Queen, Lords and Commons) could not be reached.

This volume continues the publication of Professor Elton's collected papers on topics in the history of Tudor and Stuart England. All appeared between 1973 and 1981. As before, they are reprinted exactly as originally published, with corrections and additions in footnotes. They include the author's four presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society and bring together his preliminary findings in the history of Parliament and its records. Several of them, which appeared in various collections and Festschriften, have been difficult to find, and some are taken from locations in Germany and the United States unfamiliar to English readers. The eight lengthy reviews here republished examine some of the major questions in the history of the age and throw light on the principles of investigation which underlie the author's own research.

That the making of a law and the enforcement of it are two different things is a commonplace which is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the history of economic legislation. As a recent essay on ‘The Smugglers' Trade’ has shown, the point applied with special force to the sixteenth century when the government attempted on an unprecedented scale to control the economic life of the country, and especially the export and import of goods. The problem was twofold. In the first place the administration of the customs limped badly behind the rest of the financial administration. It was not until 1536 that nationally uniform rates were imposed, and at no time could the central government be sure of exercising effective control over the local customers and searchers and their deputies. While the royal lands were put under a modernized administration in the hands of such courts as those of General Surveyors and Augmentations, nothing was done either by Henry VII or by Thomas Cromwell to go to the root of the customs question. Cromwell, indeed, produced a comprehensive code with a preamble which showed that at least he knew what the trouble was; but somewhat in contrast to his usual practice, he did not approach the administrative problem at all. The customs were left in the exchequer from whose palsied hands the royal lands had been removed; consequently, when in an age of rising prices the value of the customs revenue began to outpace that of fixed land rents, the government of Elizabeth could do no better than farm a revenue which their own machinery was incapable of handling efficiently. Until the reign of Charles II, the English customs administration was never thoroughly reformed, and governments fell back either on the inefficient exchequer or on the dubious expedient of farming.

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This volume contains the text of the three Cook Lectures, delivered by Sir Geoffrey Elton at the University of Michigan in April 1990, which reviewed various current doubts and queries concerning the writing of reasonably unbiased history. The lectures offer critical advice on how such unbiased history might be achieved, together with a general critical survey of 'fashionable' theories on the writing of history. The Cook Lectures appear in print for the first time. Also included in the volume are reprinted versions of Sir Geoffrey's two Cambridge inaugural lectures, as Professor of Constitutional History, and as Regius Professor of Modern History. These tried to dispel, respectively, what Sir Geoffrey sees as the anti-historical fantasies current in the 1960s (but by no means yet gone), and the artificial attempt to denigrate the history of one's native country.